Attorney General Eric Holder claims that a conviction of KSM is guaranteed. If that is so then what’s the point of ‘demonstrating to the world’ how the US civilian courts deal with terrorists? All that ‘the world’ gets to see is a trial in a judiciary system that is allegedly fair, yet the AG is saying that, in fact, the final judgement is predetermined and proudly proclaims that even if KSM doesn’t get convicted, he won’t get freed anyway. So the lesson to ‘the world’ is that in the US court system the fix is in?
Doesn’t Holder see the contradiction in claiming on the one hand that there’s a super-fair US civilian trial for an illegal combatant taking place and that on the other hand, no matter the outcome of the trial, the accused will get punished?
Well, he wouldn’t be the first of the Obama people to show a shocking lack of understanding the simplest principles of a free nation. Obama’s WH press secretary whines about tea parties, his director of press advance finds “amazing [...] similarities” between a ‘town-hall meeting’ in Shanghai with students who had been under seclusion and ‘preparation’ prior to the event and “hundreds of events held all over the United States during the campaign.”, and his former communications director Anita Dunn evokes Mao as one of her “favourite political philosopher” in front of a high school graduation class.
You really have to wonder who these people Obama’s selected are. If they can’t see the difference between a terrorist and a criminal, a fair trial and one in which the fix is in, or between a town-hall event in Kansas and a town-hall event in communist China, or between Mao Zedong and Mother Theresa, then you have to wonder.
Obama calls the war in Afghanistan “this thing“. This thing! This thing is where your own soldiers are getting killed while you refuse to send them the reinforcements they’ve asked for months ago, Obama! You’re the freaking Commander in Chief, Obama!
I sure hope this incompetent egomaniac will leave the White House before he’s ruined the US.
The bright and happy future that ObamaCare has to offer:
In other words, the Medicare commission would come to function much like the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, which rations care in England. Or a similar Washington state board created in 2003 to control costs. Its handiwork isn’t pretty.
The Washington commission, called the Health Technology Assessment, is manned by 11 bureaucrats, including a chiropractor and a “naturopath” who focuses on alternative, er, remedies like herbs and massage therapy. They consider the clinical effectiveness but above all the cost of medical procedures and technologies. If they decide something isn’t worth the money, then Olympia won’t cover it for some 750,000 Medicaid patients, public employees and prisoners.
So far, the commission has banned knee arthroscopy for osteoarthritis, discography for chronic back pain, and implantable infusion pumps for pain not related to cancer. This year, it is targeting such frivolous luxuries as knee replacements, spinal cord stimulation, a specialized autism therapy and MRIs of the abdomen, pelvis or breasts for cancer. It will also rule on routine ultrasounds for pregnancy, which have a “high” efficacy but also a “high” cost.
Currently, the commission is pushing through the most restrictive payment policy in the nation for drug-eluting cardiac stents—simply because bare metal stents are cheaper, even as they result in worse outcomes. If a patient is wheeled into the operating room with chest pains in an emergency, doctors will first have to determine if he’s covered by a state plan, then the diameter of his blood vessels and his diabetic condition to decide on the appropriate stent. If they don’t, Washington will not reimburse them for “inappropriate care.”
If Democrats impose such a commission nationwide, it would constitute a radical change in U.S. health care. The reason that physician discretion—not Washington’s cost-minded judgments—is at the core of medicine is that usually there are no “right” answers. The data from large clinical trials produce generic conclusions that rarely apply to individual patients, who have vastly different biologies, response rates to treatments, and often multiple conditions. A breakthrough drug like Herceptin, which is designed for a certain genetic subset of breast-cancer patients, might well be ruled out under such a standardized approach.
This is White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs whining about “analogies” and “references” and “stunning” protest signs during the health care debate:
Imagine just a few years ago had somebody walked around with images of Hitler.
Either some amnesia virus is running rampant in the White House or the entire Obama staff is already addicted to the usage of the Memory Hole.
What some smart Iranians say about the Nobel Peace Prize-winning President Hopeychangey:
The [Obama] administration has avoided discussion about the prospects for liberalization in a country [Iran] that exports radical Islamist ideology throughout the Middle East and beyond. In regressive realpolitik fashion, it has grown increasingly reticent about the Iranian people’s struggle for human rights, apparently viewing it as irrelevant to U.S security interests. Rather than bolstering the opposition at a time when the Iranian regime is at its weakest, America is pursuing a policy of appeasement.
[...]
Many Iran experts have warned that displays of Western solidarity could taint Iran’s democrats. Nonsense. Iranian cyberspace is brimming with anger at what the Green Movement sees as betrayal by the West.
[...]
President Ahmadinejad boasts on state media about his breakthrough achievement—getting respect and deference from the U.S.—while he proceeds to reject already watered-down nuclear proposals.
Can the Obama administration achieve anything with Ahmadinejad’s cabal on the nuclear front that could possibly justify its betrayal of the Iranian people and American values? We think not. And we believe the administration still has time to change course and not lose the faith of a people longing to join the Free World.
After analysing the “New Liberalism” of Obama and his ilk which wants America to “decline”, ie to end its role as the world’s hegemon, Monsieur Krauthammer explains why such a development threatens chaos and that it would be the result of an active choice that can and should be resisted in the following way:
Decline is a choice. More than a choice, a temptation. How to resist it?
First, accept our role as hegemon. And reject those who deny its essential benignity. There is a reason that we are the only hegemon in modern history to have not immediately catalyzed the creation of a massive counter-hegemonic alliance–as occurred, for example, against Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany. There is a reason so many countries of the Pacific Rim and the Middle East and Eastern Europe and Latin America welcome our presence as balancer of power and guarantor of their freedom.
And that reason is simple: We are as benign a hegemon as the world has ever seen.
So, resistance to decline begins with moral self-confidence and will. But maintaining dominance is a matter not just of will but of wallet. We are not inherently in economic decline. We have the most dynamic, innovative, technologically advanced economy in the world. We enjoy the highest productivity. It is true that in the natural and often painful global division of labor wrought by globalization, less skilled endeavors like factory work migrate abroad, but America more than compensates by pioneering the newer technologies and industries of the information age.
There are, of course, major threats to the American economy. But there is nothing inevitable and inexorable about them. Take, for example, the threat to the dollar (as the world’s reserve currency) that comes from our massive trade deficits. Here again, the China threat is vastly exaggerated. In fact, fully two-thirds of our trade imbalance comes from imported oil. This is not a fixed fact of life. We have a choice. We have it in our power, for example, to reverse the absurd de facto 30-year ban on new nuclear power plants. We have it in our power to release huge domestic petroleum reserves by dropping the ban on offshore and Arctic drilling. We have it in our power to institute a serious gasoline tax (refunded immediately through a payroll tax reduction) to curb consumption and induce conservation.
Nothing is written. Nothing is predetermined. We can reverse the slide, we can undo dependence if we will it.
The other looming threat to our economy–and to the dollar–comes from our fiscal deficits. They are not out of our control. There is no reason we should be structurally perpetuating the massive deficits incurred as temporary crisis measures during the financial panic of 2008. A crisis is a terrible thing to exploit when it is taken by the New Liberalism as a mandate for massive expansion of the state and of national debt–threatening the dollar, the entire economy, and consequently our superpower status abroad.
There are things to be done. Resist retreat as a matter of strategy and principle. And provide the means to continue our dominant role in the world by keeping our economic house in order. And finally, we can follow the advice of Demosthenes when asked what was to be done about the decline of Athens. His reply? “I will give what I believe is the fairest and truest answer: Don’t do what you are doing now.”
I don’t know about you – and I doubt Monsieur Krauthammer himself intended it so – but the French Cowboy can read “Palin 2012″ between every line of this text.
The French Cowboy is not impressed by Obama’s having received the Nobel Prize for peace. For one thing, if the people on that committee had half a brain they wouldn’t have given it to a person whose policies don’t promote peace, but the reign of terror (think the Obama administration’s one-sided concessions towards Iran, Burma, China, Russia, etc) and for the other, the prize has been given to undeserving individuals before, so you can ask yourself how much of an honour it is to be in such company. The addition of Obama isn’t going to elevate the average, though.
So what does the prize mean for Afghanistan? If anything, then it will embolden Obama to make the wrong decision and to send too few troops there. Imagine what this prize must do to Obama’s already inflated ego. He must feel confirmed in all his wrong notions. Bon travail, Nobel committee.
Oh, why couldn’t Obama just become the UN’s general secretary? That would have been a job much more suitable for him than his current one and doomsday would be still a couple of years further in the future.
And here are the top 10 reasons why Chicago didn’t get the Olympics:
10. Dead people can’t vote at IOC meetings
9. Obama distracted by 25 min meeting with Gen. McChrystal
8. Who cares if Obama couldn’t talk the IOC into Chicago? He’ll be able to talk Iran out of nukes.
7. The impediment is Israel still building settlements.
6. Obviously no president would have been able to acomplish it.
5. We’ve been quite clear and said all along that we didn’t want the Olympics.
4. This isn’t about the number of Olympics “lost”, it’s about the number of Olympics “saved” or “created”.
3. Clearly not enough wise Latina judges on the committee
2. Because the IOC is racist.
1. It’s George Bush’s fault.
WH: We Exposed Myths of McChrystal’s Assessment – French Cowboy Unsure Whether to Laugh Or Cry
What’s wrong with this picture:
But White House officials are resisting McChrystal’s call for urgency, which he underscored Thursday during a speech in London, and questioning important elements of his assessment, which calls for a vast expansion of an increasingly unpopular war. One senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the meeting, said, “A lot of assumptions — and I don’t want to say myths, but a lot of assumptions — were exposed to the light of day.”
[...]
Senior White House officials asked some of the sharpest questions, according to participants and others who have been briefed on the meeting, while the uniformed military, including Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command, did not take issue with McChrystal’s assessment.
According to White House officials involved in the meeting, Vice President Biden offered some of the more pointed challenges to McChrystal, who attended the session by video link from Kabul. One official said Biden played the role of “skeptic in chief,” while other top officials, including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, were muted in their comments.
So let’s see, on the one side you have General McChrystal and General Petraeus, on the other you have “senior White House officials” including Joe Biden. Whose assessment would you rely on when making decisions on the Afghan war?
In a better world, McChrystal would resign. But in a better world, he wouldn’t be in the situation in which he is in the first place. It’s too obvious already that Obama put him into his position only to get nice headlines, then wriggle out of what is his plain and clear responsibility as the Commander-in-Chief, ie doing what is best to win the war. Instead Obama sends his underlings (aka “senior White House officials”) to make “pointed challenges” against the General’s assessment so that he can hide himself behind his Vice President’s anti-Chrystal clear grasp of the situation when he starves the efforts of the military in the hopes of saving a few bucks to make his disastrous deficits look a little less disastrous.
“Assumptions” – not to call them myths! – were “exposed”! Really? Gosh, aren’t we lucky we got “senior White House officials” to expose the “assumptions” of people like McChrystal and Petraeus? Imagine we didn’t have “senior White House officials” to check those crazy military guys! We’d be in danger of actually winning the war and – what’s probably even worse – of making conservatives happy – let alone the (ever decreasing) rest of the nation that wasn’t marinated in anti-American self-loathing!
The French Cowboy thinks that everybody would understand should McChrystal decide to resign. But I also have a hunch that he takes his responsibility too serious to step down unless the situation with the Obama administration has become absolutely hopeless. The men and women in the battlefield don’t have the luxury of resigning their posts because their Commander-in-Chief isn’t decided on which team he’s in either. McChrystal wouldn’t want to let them down, nor the rest of the nation for which a defeat in Afghanistan might be more costly than it’s currently aware of.
I can’t help but have the impression that Obama is trading in victory in the wars and at least somewhat sustainable deficits for his narcissistic ‘Transform America until it’s unrecognisable’ plans that will leave not only America but indeed the entire planet in worse shape. Who is to gain when the President of the United States weakens his own country from the inside and babbles nonsense like “[n]o one nation can or should try to dominate another nation” as if he were an 8-year old playing ‘UN meeting’ with stuffed animals not the US President giving a speech while thugs from Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Burma etc are snickering over their bright future? Not the tortured prisoners in Cuba and China or the starving masses in North Korea, that much is clear.
